Technophobia results are available here: http://quizbowl.caltech.edu/T8/ I must agree with Willie; I think that Technophobia went rather well, although of course it could have gone better. We scheduled the tournament without realizing that I, the person who wound up doing most of the packet editing work, would have to take the CS Subject GRE the same day of the tournament; nevertheless, I'm still very pleased with the outcome. Oz did a great job of taking the helm and making sure everything worked while I wasn't there. We had a great turnout, saw some new faces on the circuit, and I think had a good time. Just to clear up some possible confusion and to discuss the issues that Willie mentioned: > PM), and the fact the tournament started almost an hour late, it's For those not in the know, we decided to start the tournament late because at TRASH, which had run late the night before, the teams going to Technophobia (a majority of the teams at Technophobia) were in favor of it. So, while there were some logistical issues the next morning, most of it was attempting to be sensitive to the needs of the teams playing in the tournament. > the wrong room and the moderators could have easily read the wrong > packet (which did happen once, to my knowledge). This is a problem at any tournament, and here it was a moderator not looking at the packet ... he had a question and should have asked the TD rather than taking issues into his own hands. Nevertheless, I think that the schedule was a good idea. It kept teams busy, saved you from having byes, and made the best use of the rooms we had when we had them. The next best schedule would have given you just as many games but lasted an hour and a half longer. > think it's a good idea to have to play the same packet at different > times of the day--especially before and after lunch. This did not happen. If you'll take a look at the schedule, one packet was read in different divisions in rounds 1 and 2 another packet was read in different divisions in rounds 3, 4, and only in one room in 5. There was no overlap with lunch. All of the madness was over by lunch. I think we can trust teams on different floors not to blab about questions in the space of the five minutes between rounds. If it's good enough for past NAQT nationals, it should be good enough for Technophobia. > (2) It might be a good idea to mandate teams to submit their > packets at least two weeks before the tournament. Some packets We did have reasonable packet deadlines, but very few teams met those deadlines. UCI should be commended for getting their packet in early, but even though we had generous packet deadlines, many packets were quite a bit late. Even though I had asked for warning if packets were going to be late, only one team warned me ... five other teams were late. This meant that I couldn't keep as much of the packets as I would have liked, and I couldn't use some packets because it would have taken too much work to edit them before Friday. This unfortunately manifested itself in the tournament because the packets that came in later were also the ones that needed more editing. Although a few typos and whatnot slipped through, I think that things came off fairly well. I also, not to excuse myself, did not get all of the blind questions I was counting on. I had made arrangements to get 12/12 blind, but only ended up getting 8/4 ... not a big deal, but on the night before, every hour counts, and it's not easy to write decent tossups on very little sleep. Too much of my time was spent writing questions I didn't have, and not enough was spent proofreading. > the same categories were left in their consecutive order; a This was somewhat deliberate, and I should have explained this in the schedule. The questions were randomized by a computer, which saved me some time and hassle. Thus, no human went through and removed things that might be percieved as "non-random." I think the possibility of consecutive questions in the same category is a *good* thing. If you know that the question after a lit questions will not be a lit question, you have knowledge about the next question that goes beyond the actual text of the question, which I think is a bad thing. I think that you should be ready *any* type of question to come at you ... I would love to get more feedback on this. It wouldn't be that difficult to change the shuffle program to not put the same topic next to each other (since all the questions were tagged with categories). > was editing the packet as he was reading. This happens at every tournament, although perhaps more of it happened here than it should have. A good moderator will skim a question before reading it an mentally parse the grammar and gracefully handle any mistakes; this should be completely invisible to teams playing. There were several typos that I saw in the TRASH questions I read the night before, but none that prevented me from reading the question as grammatical sentences. I think that only the same variety of errors were present here. If the moderators made an issue of the errors in the packets, it is my fault for not providing skilled moderators (I think the majority of the rooms had no problems here). There were, however, three very, very bad errors for which I must accept complete responsibility: * The New Caledonia tossup said "west" instead of "east" * My shuffling program screwed up the order of one of the visual bonuses * A quasi-repeat of "Wittgenstein" in packet 12 (the worst place to have such a repeat) > (3) If possible, I'd like to be able to play against as many > opponents as possible. Because of the scheduling difficulties, we > ended up playing against the same team 4 times! Yet we didn't get To be fair, this was hardly our fault. UCR left the tournament early (at 17:00, rather than playing the playoff rounds until 18:30). In the original schedule, you would have ended up playing USC twice, which I think is a good thing for closely matched teams. Unfortunately, you cannot play every team at a tournament when there are 18 teams. It's part of the luck of the draw and how you play. We should teams of near-equal ability play each other. If Berkeley and Stanford end up at the top, we should still have them play even though they see each other "all the time." > (4) It might be nice to expand the awards system so that more new > players receive recognition for various achievements. We did recognize the top Div II team, which is frankly more than most invitational tournaments (on this coast at least) have ever done. In my four years here, I don't remember a Div II individual or team prize (or undergrad for that matter) prize at any Cardinal Classic, WIT, UCI Open, or Tremor Bowl I've attended. Correct me if I'm wrong. Please, I would love to get more feedback from everyone. I'm very glad that all of you attended the tournament, and I hope everyone had a blast. -Jordan, The Tired Technophobia TD
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